Archives for April 2013

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** Over the last few days, the special referral account we set up has grown from $100 to over $300. And we’re about to turn it over to our winner… Crystal Anderson (who says she needs wall art “like no one’s business.”) Congrats! Last spring we curated a sale on Joss & Main, and we were psyched when they invited us back again this year – and agreed to a special perk for you guys (more on that in a sec). Getting the opportunity to reopen a little virtual decor store of sorts over there is always fun, and although we didn’t set the prices ourselves,

Ding dong, the bare spot above the TV is dead. Remember how it used to look like this for a few years? And then we graduated to a bigger tv and kept an eye out for the right media cabinet for another year or so. And then we finally got here with the help of a $59 cabinet that we found at a thrift store… Whew. So glad it’s NNM (nekkid no more). Don’t mind that power strip on the ground, I’ve since shoved it behind the media cabinet to hide it. Dang it feels good to be a gangsta have a shelf there. We actually debated a bunch of options for above the TV

Ok, not the whole world, but a good smattering of it. For those of you who watched our house tour video yesterday, you’ve seen a shot of these babies in action (and by these babies, I mean eight freshly framed prints that we hung in our hallway above the board & batten that we added). But here are some close ups with all the how-we-did-it deets. It was a really easy project actually. First, we bought an awesome calendar at Anthropologie on sale after the new year for $13 (gotta love how calendars go half price the second that January begins) but we had zero intention of using it in the traditional sense since we

It’s been over half a year since we shared our last video house tour, and since a bunch of you’ve been requesting an update, we finally cleaned the whole house shoved everything into our closets and made an all-one-take video. At first it seemed like we didn’t have that many new things to report, but then we realized that there were tons of changes since our previous tour (a freshly redone hall bathroom, a storage-room-turned-playroom, new lighting in the living room and dining room, lots of sunroom updates, a new fireplace facade and a fresh color in the kitchen, hallway board & batten, etc). So without further ado, let’s walk around the house together. I’ll

Remember this “Things That Are Awesome” print that we got at a local craft fair last Christmas by an amazing artist named Rachel (here’s her shop) with the intent of hanging it in the guest room (you know, so everyone can study all the things that are awesome while they stay)? Well, we finally got it framed and hung. This is actually an angle of the guest room that we haven’t shown for a long loong time. As in, this post from two summers ago is the last time we shared it. And then a year later we grabbed that big mirror and hung it over the mantel in the kitchen and a while later

Holy cow you guys, I’m crazypants excited to share Bonnie’s sweet vine covered barn in Santa Ynez, California. It’s a home with some much happiness and charm squeezed in, I think anyone who drops in would feel right at home. So let’s drop in, shall we? Here’s sweet Bonnie to welcome us. I wish we could have crashed her in person to meet her ourselves, but her photos were too good not to share, so this is one of our more rare “virtual” house crashings. Let’s step inside, shall we? Her office area is set up right near the entryway, and everything from the desk and chair (both from Ikea) to the cool ladder in

Ladies & Gentlemen, may I present to you…. (*various trumpets sound and doves fly*)… King Pantry! Why has our pantry earned such a regal title? Because it’s wearing some crown… Allow me to rewind and explain its road to the throne a bit first. You may remember that the few upper cabinets in our kitchen have lived a very humble life so far. When we finished our kitchen reno last year we decided to forgo any crown molding on the top of our pantry, microwave cabinet, and fridge because we kinda liked the clean, modern look of the square edge (we held some leftover molding up and it didn’t look great to us so we crossed

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** Well the lucky April fool, er, person who’s getting the $500 gift card to the home improvement store of their choosing – all thanks to Hometalk! – is… Rebecca (who says she and her husband really need a router table to change out some non-functional kitchen cabinets). Congrats! Nope, this isn’t a joke. Someone somewhere in the world is gonna win $500 this week, and it’s all thanks to Hometalk. It’s a free community where DIYers and pros can exchange projects and advice, which makes it a great spot to discover new ideas (everything from major remodels to easy cleaning tips pop up). The photo-centric

It’s pretty clear from all the embedded music videos and song-reference-titled posts that John and I are music lovers. John even mentioned that he sings a lot in this post and we all know that I was a wee bit enamored with a certain rapper in my youth (an obsession that drove me to say the word “phat” on national TV). So when a musician friend here in Richmond casually invited us into their studio to mess around… well something magical happened. One thing led to another, and we ended up pouring all of our DIY passion into a DIYed song for you guys. Full of life lessons, house trials and tribulations, design rules that